SIPs

One of the more amusing features added to amazon.com recently is the inclusion, for many books, of SIPs: Statistically Improbable Phrases. As it is explained on the website:

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

Maybe I should leave this list to speak for itself. I don’t fined “general equivalent” or “doing economics” or even “feminist economists” to be all that surprising… but “beautiful shirts”?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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One Response to “SIPs”

Shaviro on Statistically Improbably Phrases is fun–a recent Amazon feature which Yanks have probably already noticed that outputs a list of uncommon phrases detected in the book you’re looking at. It’s basically an incredible way to waste an hour or t…